🔮 January Vibe Check ✅

Vibe Check is a (new!) brand-flavored vibe check, sprinkled with crunchy manifestations of the big storylines of 2024, and topped with a dollop of ‘who’s who’ - notable brands doing left of center things, and left of center brands doing notable things. Like what you read? Click the button below to join for free.

What happened in January 2024?

Planet Earth rolled into a dark start to 2024, with war in Gaza and Ukraine, superpower rivalry and slow growth (is this the polycrisis the World Economic Forum were warned of?).

The one where we thought the layoffs were over…sike!

👩‍💻 Adding to an overall vibe of uncertainty, the layoffs we thought we’d left in 2023 continued at the same clip (1%). Anna Wintour laid off Pitchfork staff without removing her sunglasses and in an extreme case of authentic, unfiltered content, someone livestreamed their layoff, prompting lots of hot takes about Gen-Z, workplace dignity, and retaliation.

All signs (door plugs, sweaters) pointed to the crisis of quality

💎 The crisis of quality that made headlines in 2023 on everything from the degrading quality of sweaters to boycotts of fast-fashion got very real when an Alaska Airlines 737 door plug blew out on a flight from Portland, prompting sharp criticism of manufacturer Boeing’s quality control process.

Nevertheless, the brand marketers persisted

📢 2024 has been declared the ‘return of brand marketing’, and it’s off to roaring start, with Calvin Klein’s Jeremy Allen White campaign launching an armada of thinkpieces from adland on ”beefcake gravitas”, a flurry of ‘yes, chef’ social media posts, and a hilarious spoof ad by Berlin beer brand BRLO spruiking non-alcoholic beer (N.A. beer - something we’ll certainly see more of in 2024). TikTok launched brand campaign “it starts on TikTok” aimed at shedding perceptions of the platform as a home for dance-offs and silly memes and moving to a new kind of search engine. That new kind of search engine? It’s all about TikTok’s play in social commerce which is huge and eating SHEIN & Temu’s lunch.

Are our new heroes anti-trust agencies and judges?

In political brand land, Trump won the Republican primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, but lost in court to E. Jean Carroll, on the hook for $83M in defamation damages. Influencer Chiara Ferragni was also in legal hot water, fined $1.1M over a lack of clarity in a Christmas charity initiative - essentially Italy’s antitrust agency making an example of the influencer, who this month passed stringent rules requiring influencers with over 1M followers working with Italian brands to clearly label ad content.

Sports: still big business, still not equal

⚽️ A not-so-hot 2024 headline continuing 2023’s theme of women’s sports crushing it: Luis Rubiales, Ex-Chief of Spanish soccer, will face trial over a nonconsensual kiss of a player during the Women’s World Cup final in Sydney last year. Speaking of sports, Amer sports, the owner of Arc’teryx, Salomon and Wilson announced they were targeting an $8.7B valuation for an IPO this year.

Gaurdrails! Guardrails! Guardrails! Chanted the Swifties

🤖 In news I’d personally like to escape from, the rise of empathetic AI is finding early applications with AI girlfriend chatbots which have flooded OpenAI’s GPT store. In another dark twist on the AI storyline, Microsoft scrambled to push a guardrails update to Microsoft Design AI that “prevent the use of non-consensual photos” after sexually explicit deepfakes of Taylor Swift originated from its software. Swifties united on X using #ProtectTaylorSwift in another example of fandoms fueling culture.

PR firms + climate denial 🤝 it’s a love story, baby

🧾 In scintillating tax news (three words that have maybe never gone together?) and the embodiment of the erosion of trust is a key storyline for 2024, Edelman’s tax records revealed that the world’s largest PR firm, whose lip service to climate harks back to 2014, was one of the Charles Koch foundation’s highest-paid vendors in 2022 🧐.

Intersectionality? Labor Rights? All people could talk about was Barbie

At Sundance: Union, a documentary drops on the Amazon Labor Union and the rise of decentralized power, on the heels of ‘hot labor summer’ of 2023. Greta & Margot didn’t win any Academy Awards for Barbie and a lot of women had a lot to say about it, while others called out ‘Barbie feminism’s’ lack of intersectionality.

Is the Rx for ‘escaping the polycrisis Paris and Girl Scout cookies? surrealism, but make it fashion

😴 In Paris at Couture week, Maison Margiela embodied dreamlike escapes from it all, releasing a heck of a preview on the ‘gram and staging a dramatic, theatrical show devoted to “the physical expression of emotions.” 🍪 And in a more affordable escape, it’s Girl Scout cookie season. Girl Scouts are taking commenting on previous year Venmo transactions (brill) and partnering with Native deodorant (Samoa scented pits, anyone?).

That’s a wrap.

Thanks for reading! As a reminder, I’m an independent brand strategist specializing in repositioning brands, bringing new visual and verbal identities to life, and fractional brand-led marketing work. If you’d like to rent my brain, book a 1:1 call with me or reply to this email for longer engagements.

✌️ Amanda